WHY
JIM McDERMOTT IS A HERO and Tom Lantos is a scheming hypocrite

There
was Colette
Avital, a Labor Party member of the Israeli Knesset, on
a trip to Capitol Hill, worried about the prospect of war
in the Middle East. Rep. Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat
on the House Committee on International Affairs, took her
by the hand, and, according to Ha'aretz, tried to reassure
her with these
soothing words:

"My
dear Colette, don't worry. You won't have any problem with
Saddam. We'll be rid of the bastard soon enough. And in his
place we'll install a pro-Western dictator, who will be good
for us and for you."

Good
for us, and for Israel – but not so good for Iraq. Oh well,
c'est la vie!

I
can't really say I'm shocked – shocked! – at such a
display of brazen cynicism: and neither, I trust, are you.
But I fear Ms. Avital was a bit taken aback by this confidence,
and seemed hardly assuaged as Lantos explained that this "interim
period" of pro-Western autocracy "should last between
five to six years." Yes, but….

"Avital
says she asked how one can talk about a dictator in Iraq and
at the same time demand 'democratic reforms' in the territories
as a precondition for renewing the peace process."

Easy,
my dear: Lantos has learned how to speak using an orifice
other than his mouth. That way, he can bray – a word invented
to describe the Lantosian oratorical style – about bringing
democracy to the Middle East at one end, and call for a "pro-Western
dictator" at the other end. The problem, with Lantos,
is telling
which end is which.

He's
a old fraud with all the morals of an iguana, and among the
loudest of those Joe
Conason calls "the windbags of war," but Lantos
was being truthful, for once. The goal of democratizing the
region is "just a general 'road map,'" he continued.
After all, the "the U.S. didn't turn into a democracy
overnight." One wonders exactly when it began
to measure up to his standards, but, "in any case, he
promised her that after America gets rid of all the regimes
of evil, it will go straight to Syria, 'and tell young
Assad that's what will happen to him if he doesn't stop
supporting terrorism.'"

Even
as worried members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats,
work to craft a resolution that will limit the ambitions of
King George the Conqueror, the "on to Baghdad!"
crowd is howling "On to Damascus!" and "On
to Tehran!" and, most of all, "On to Riyadh!"
Having got its foot in the door, the War Party is intent on
prying it all the way open – and won't be stopped by any congressional
resolution.

Who
will leash the dogs of war once the conflict has got going?
Will Congress pass another resolution? Will they cut off war
funding? No, and certainly not. The other day on "The
McLaughlin Group," Tony Blankley smiled knowingly
as he described how everyone would "get behind the President"
when the shooting starts, and I'm afraid he's right. The war
hysteria is already building. Look at the crazed brouhaha
over the visit of congressmen David Bonior, Jim McDermott
and Mike Thompson to Iraq. They went on a
humanitarian mission to Iraq at the request of U.S. church
groups, and McDermott said in a live interview on ABC's "This
Week" what everyone knows to be true:

"I
think the president would mislead the American people. It
would not surprise me if they came with some information that
is not provable."

McDermott
has become a
lightning rod in the political storm over Iraq. The War
Party wants to turn him into another Cynthia McKinney – but
it won't work. Donald Rumsfeld convicted this administration
out of his own mouth when, on September 25, 2001, he had the
following exchange with a reporter:

Questioner:
"Mr. Secretary, if I could just follow up, will there
be any circumstances, as you prosecute this campaign, in which
anyone in the Department of Defense will be authorized to
lie to the news media in order to increase the chances of
success of a military operation or gain some other advantage
over your adversaries?"

Rumsfeld:
"Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill's famous
phrase when he said  don't quote me on this, okay? I don't
want to be quoted on this, so don't quote me. He said sometimes
the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard
of lies  talking about the invasion date and the invasion location.
And indeed, they engaged not just in not talking about the
date of the Normandy invasion or the location, whether it
was to be Normandy Beach or just north off of Belgium, they
actually engaged in a plan to confuse the Germans as to where
it would happen. And they had a fake army under General Patton
and one thing and another thing. That is a piece of history,
and I bring it up just for the sake of background."

Of
course, Rummy knew they would quote him, and this underscores
the eerie atmosphere created by this administration, where
brazen lies are joyfully told, and no pretenses to truth are
even attempted. This, after all, is the same gang that proposed
an "Office
of Strategic Information" whose primary function
– aside from the care and feeding of numerous Washington bureaucrats
– was
to lie to the media so as to confuse "the enemy"
(and, incidentally, the American people – or do I repeat myself?).

Prevarication
is the settled policy of this administration. One of
the President's top advisors has not only admitted to being
a liar, he boasted about it to reporters. So where is McDermott
wrong?

Ah,
but the fact that he said it in Baghdad, you see, makes
him a "traitor," the post-9/11 equivalent of "Lord
Haw-Haw," as George
Will pontificated. The war hysteria of the pundit class
has unhinged them, and made them forget even the most elementary
history. Lord Haw Haw was broadcasting his treason as Hitler
had conquered the whole of Europe with an army of millions,
threatening to overrun Russia and swallow up the Western isles
in a single gulp.

On
the other hand, Saddam Hussein commands a ramshackle army
and lords it over a nation in ruins, hemmed in on every side
by the Great Powers, who are now debating and bargaining over
his fate. And, of course, Lord Haw Haw was a committed fascist
ideologue, and McDermott is a liberal Democrat, but such niceties
are lost in the general emoting – or so George Will and his
fellow war-hawks hope. Even staunch opponents of this war,
such as Pat Buchanan, attacked McDermott and the others as
the contemporary equivalent, not of Lord Haw Haw, but of Jane
Fonda, who famously went to Hanoi during the Vietnam mess.

But
Fonda made her trip after the shooting had already been going
on for years: what's more, her goal was to give the Vietnamese
Communists political support. McDermott, Bonior, and
Thompson, on the other hand, made their journey to give political
support to the peace process: their goal, quite different
from Fonda's, is to stop this war before it starts.

Bypassing
this war-maddened administration, these three congressmen
are reasserting congressional control over the foreign policy
of the United States – which has been usurped by the imperial
presidency. If the Bushies want to bring "democracy"
to Iraq, let them start in the U.S., where an elite corps
of policy wonks without military experience or common sense
is pushing us into a fateful and bloody regional conflict.

Don't
worry, says the leading Democrat on the House International
Affairs Committee to his Israeli visitor, it'll be "good
for us and good for you." Israel will benefit from this
war once it really begins to get out of hand, and we'll march
right up to the gates of Damascus and smite Israel's enemies
in Syria and Lebanon. Meanwhile Ariel Sharon can drive the
Palestinians into what
is fated to be the Hashemite Kingdom of the Fertile Crescent
 and the chief object of this war will be accomplished.

The
Left says this is a war for oil, and that is true, as far
as it goes. The big oil companies are openly
competing for favor with the various Iraqi exile factions,
trying to buy and beg their way into what promises to be a
hot opportunity. But that is just the gravy, while this frank
admission by one of Israel's most outspoken partisans in the
U.S. Congress is, I believe, the main course.

Seen
in the context of this administration's evolution on the Middle
East question, the President's drive to war is but an extension
of his radical tilt toward Israel. Bush's first inclination
was to rein in his troublesome ally, but he didn't
meet with much success. In response, the Israeli Prime
Minister compared
Bush to Neville Chamberlain and angrily declared that
his nation would not meet the fate of Czechoslovakia.

In
the face of this open
defiance, the Bushies did not merely back down. They reversed
course and began to appease
Sharon and his very vocal and active American supporters  to
the point of dragging America into an unnecessary and costly
conflict. Let's drop the pretenses, as Lantos did, at least
for a moment, and acknowledge the geographic and political
reality: this is a war to make the world safe for a Greater
Israel.

Thousands
of Americans, at the very least, may die for this cause,
without ever being told about it. They'll be told that we're
fighting "terrorism," building "democracy,"
and saving "the children" by our war-birds, such
as Tom Lantos, who know it's all a lie. Jim McDermott may
be too brave for his own good, and may lack strategic sense,
but next to Lantos the liar he's a paragon of congressional
virtue  and a patriot to boot. For while Lantos is scheming
to divide up the Middle Eastern spoils, confiding to a member
of a foreign government the presumably secret plan to take
Damascus as well as Baghdad, McDermott is concerned enough
about what is in America's interest to put his own person
on the line. Rep. McDermott is an American patriot, and so
is Scott Ritter. Without heroes like them, World War IV is
a virtual certainty.

George
Will has always been among the most useful of Israel's idiots,
if not the most idiotic. For him, of all people, to employ
Lenin's well-known phrase to attack patriots like McDermott
underscores the moral inversion of the post-9/11 era.

CHECK
OUT CHRONICLES

Chronicles,
the monthly magazine of the Rockford Institute, always a great
read, has published an article by me: "Larry Ellison’s
Golden Age: Profiteers of the Warfare State," in the
October issue, now at your local newsstand. (To subscribe,
call: 1-800-877-5459.) This just arrived in my mailbox, and
I can’t wait to dig in: it’s their special terrorism issue,
titled "Dial 911 and Scream – America’s Experiment in
Terror," featuring such promising titles as "George
W. Bush, Wilsonian Liberal," and a review of Dinesh D’Souza’s
What’s So Great About America? that starts out: "Dinesh
D’Souza is a classic example of the immigrant imperialist."
Okay, I’m outta here: this I have got to read
….